Big Pile of Presents

I got a huge pile of presents today. I don’t actually remember being that good over the last year, but I’ll take the presents if they are put in front of me….

I hope you all got plenty of presents too.

Driving to Christmas

Drove down to Christmas today. The weather (which has been threatening all sorts of nastiness) was actually quite kind. Although it was very cold.

Bye Bye iPhone

Today is a fairly momentous one (if you can have fairly momentous days). I’ve reached the end of my 18 month iPhone contract and it is time to formally move all my mobile phone stuff over to my Windows Phone device. I’ve been carrying two phones around for a while, which has been a pain. Anyhoo, today is the day that the number transfer goes through so that in the unlikely event of anyone ringing me up, they will now reach me through the wonder of Windows Phone.

I’ve really enjoyed using an iPhone. It represented a genuine advance on the field when it came out all those years ago. It is a delightful device which is a pleasure to use and has served me very well. I went through three iPhones in total in my time with the platform. However, I’ve used Windows Phone for a while now and I prefer it. Stuff seems to take fewer presses to achieve. When I use my iPhone I find myself pressing the screen for a back button that isn’t there and the way you move between applications seems clunky to me. Some of the more recent advances to the OS seem to have detracted from the initial simplicity that it had.

The Windows Phone has a way to go. There are a few iPhone features that I’ll miss for a while but I reckon that Windows Phone will catch up over time.  And I love the idea that I can write C# for the device.

PS3 Disk Upgrade

I’m having some quality time off work this week. And by quality I mean messing around with technical things. Today I upgraded the hard disk in the PS3. I’ve had this console since the day of release, when 60G was quite a large amount of storage (as opposed to about enough to put in a phone). Anyhoo, the upgrade process looked easy enough. Buy a new disk, back up the old one, drop in the new one and do a quick restore.

And that’s how it turned out. The only real problem was finding a FAT formatted disk for the PS3 backup (the program in the PS3 is a bit fussy about this). However, having set up a disk appropriately everything went well. The only tricky thing apart from that was getting the bracket off the old drive. It had been fitted with screws that seemed to  have been tightened by Superman’s stronger brother. And of course I’d hidden the only screwdriver that stood a chance of not destroying the heads of the screws. But with a bit of care and a Swiss Army pen knife (apparently Swiss Navy ones are much harder to come by) we prevailed.

If you fancy giving yourself a bit more space for media and stuff on your PS3 I strongly recommend going for the upgrade.

Christmas Party

We had our Christmas party today at work. Good food, good company and no photographs, because I was having such a good time I forgot to take any.

Optimus Quest Winner

Well, I’ve had a fun weekend going through all the Optimus Quest entries. By the end I’d had loads and it has taken a while to take a look at each one. Quite a few people had submitted multiple ideas, which was great but meant even more stuff to go through. For each of the entries the questions I considered, in order, were:

• Can this application actually be made to work on the phone?
• Can I see anyone using/playing the application?
• Has it been done before on Windows Phone?

That narrowed things down a bit, and then I moved on to picking a winner from the ones that are left.  Which was very, very, tricky. At the end I settled on “Magic Finger” from Marcin Limanski. A very nice idea that I hesitate to describe in too much detail in case someone else takes it on and gets there first. If you want to contact me Marcin we’ll see about getting the phone sent to you.

The Bad Taste award goes to “Poo Shoot” from Marc Cutsforth which was pretty much as disgusting as the name implies. The Most Amusingly Useless award goes to “Spinning Bow Tie” from ‘Ignorant Pom’.

Honourable mentions go to Emma-Jane Alexander,  Beverley Usher, David Parker, Simon Johnson and Jason Wakefield for workable ideas that really should be taken further.

Thanks to everyone who took part, and thanks again to Sheryl at LG for supplying me with such a nice prize to give away.

Animal Husbandry

I got to feed the pigs today. We keep chucking hay in for them to use as bedding and they keep eating it, which reflects something of a lack of forward planning on their part. Good thing they are hardy.

The water in their bottle freezes solid every night. Pig management tip: Keep duplicate water bottles in the kitchen so that you can just swap them for the solid ones each day, rather than spending 10 minutes holding the frozen ones under the hot tap and making yourself late for work.

Hammering and Sawing

Why is it that the thing you buy to replace the thing that broke is a quarter of an inch bigger all the way round? When the thing in question is a door lock this results in a bunch of hammering, chiselling and swearing.

Not necessarily in that order.

Anyhoo, the front door now both closes and opens (as opposed to only doing one of those things easily). We actually convinced one unfortunate guest that we had automatically locked him out. Kind of like a “Reverse Hotel California”.

The Optimus Quest Nears its End

You have have just over an hour to get your ideas for Windows Phone applications to optmiusquest@robmiles.com. Best idea gets a shiny LG Optimus 7. Find out more at /optimusquest

Free “Windows Phone Blue Book” Course

Microsoft Faculty Connection have just released my “Windows Phone Programming Blue Book”. This is kind of a companion to the "C# Yellow Book” which has been around for a while. However, it has a lot more stuff with it. There are demo programs and also a whole set of presentations and exercises that you could use to create a complete course on Windows Phone 7. You can find the content here:

https://www.facultyresourcecenter.com/curriculum/pfv.aspx?ID=8729

Christmas Bash 2010

The Christmas Bash is becoming a tradition. From modest beginnings a couple of years ago we now have a well established setup which this year included Team Fortress, Track Mania, Kinect, PS Move and Band Hero. Along with the ever popular word search. In fact I was aghast to see a bunch of students ignoring their gaming terminals and instead searching through the grid for such words as “Battleships”, “Theatre” and of course “wordsearch”.

The gathering actually established a new record for bashes. From 22 pizzas to nothing in around 6 minutes. Amazing.

There are more pictures on Flickr. If you have any of your own please tag them hullxmasbash2010.

Busy Marking

If you have been trying to find me over the last couple of days you would have been out of luck. I’ve been in the First Year labs marking student programs. Actually great fun (but also very hard work). Saw some stuff that could easily go to market, which was very nice.

Just half a day of marking left and then we can get on with the Christmas Bash.

Mad Game Development in the Press

You might remember our Mad Game Development a few weeks ago. Fifteen teams spent 24 hours on campus writing a game. Great fun. Writer Peter Gothard (now of GamesTM Magazine) came along for the ride (actually it was his idea….)

Anyhoo, he has now written up the whole thing as a superb article in 360 Magazine this month. With pictures of all the teams and screenshots of their games it is well worth a read. In all good newsagents now..

Cheese Clipart

You wouldn’t believe how much pictures cost for games. I can get a picture of a piece of cheese for a pound I can use in a web page. If I want to put it into a game I’m going to have to spend an awful lot more than that. More than the price of a piece of cheese…..

So today I was in the conservatory photographing cheese for use in my next cheese based XNA game project.  And next I’m going to eat it all.

LG Optimus 7 Windows Phone Review

Don’t forget my Optimus Quest, where you can win an LG Optimums 7.

For the last few days I’ve been using an LG Optimus 7 Windows phone. I really like it. Actually, I like all the Windows phone models. They all run the same operating system and so their look and feel is going to be the same. They also have to hit the same platform specification which means that display, camera, performance and battery life are going to be good.

However is interesting how different phone manufacturers have taken the platform and worked at making it their own. LG have done quite a few things to make their phone special. They also seem to have had some luck getting access to parts of the hardware that other phones can’t reach.

The phone itself is pleasingly weighty and is rounded to fit the hand very well. The back has a brushed metal finish that pulls off the trick of being shiny but not showing any nasty fingerprints. The screen is bright and clear and very responsive. Unlike other Windows Phone devices it actually has physical buttons along the front which add a nice tactile feel to using it. Inside the phone you can find 16G of memory, which is useful if you have a Zune pass and want to store a bunch of music on the device. From a hardware point of view the design is nicely understated and classy.

Each Windows Phone manufacturer has their own application store and this is where the LG phone starts to pull away from the crowd a bit.  For a start there are more than a handful of programs in there and a few of them are actually useful and fun. The Panorama shot makes a reasonable job of controlling the camera, letting you stitch together up to 5 pictures to make a panorama. The Voice to text application takes what you say and puts it into a Tweet, Note or email. And it works too. The Scan Search application is very interesting in that it is the only program I’ve ever seen on Windows Phone that actually uses the compass and a video overlay from the camera to provide an augmented reality display that points you at nearby points of interest. 

If you are in the market for a Windows Phone I’d start with a look at this one.

Got your Zune Pass Yet?

If you’ve got a Windows Phone and you haven’t checked out the Zune pass yet then you are missing out. Zune pass is an “all you can eat” deal which lets you download and store loads of music onto mobile devices and PCs. You pay a monthly fee to keep the music going and you can have as much of it with you as you can fit onto your Windows Phone or Zune. You can chop and change your tunes as much as you like and keep a different range of sounds on each platform. Of course the bad news is that if you stop paying, it stops playing but I think that for around nine quid a month it is actually a pretty good deal.

I really like the way that you can hear a tune you like and then have the whole album on your phone a few minutes later. Windows Phone even has the amazing Shazam application (one of the few programs that I reckon is actually powered by magic) that will put a name to tunes that you play to it, to make the process easier. I’ve been happily downloading content and listening to it. Current favourites is “Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter Plays the Hits”. Country music (and other stuff) done real well.

Rob Miles XNA 3.0 eBook at Half Price

On Friday 10th December (although I think it might extend over the weekend too) you can get a copy of my XNA programming book as an eBook for half price. Use the discount code DDXNA at the O’Reilly book web page.

This brings the price of the book down to not much more than a couple of Big Mac meals. Well worth it (and a lot less fattening).

Win an LG Optimus 7 Windows Phone

Coming to your pocket soon?

Thanks go to Sheryl for sending me an LG Optimus 7 phone to take a look at. She has also sent one for me to give away, so I proudly announce the “Optimus Quest” competition.

Send me your ideas for Windows Phone Marketplace programs and I’ll give the phone as a prize to the best idea. You can find full details in the Rob Miles Optimus Quest Competition pages.

I’m going to be using an Optimus 7 (not the prize one – that is staying in the box all shiny and new) for the next few days and I’ll let you know what I think of it. First impressions – very nice indeed.

Final Battleships Tutorial Podcasts Available

I managed to find a quiet time at work today to record the last two podcasts for the 08101 Battleships tutorial. You can find all the tutorials here:

• Session 1: Getting Started
• Session 2: Handling player Moves
• Session 3: Making Computer Moves
• Session 4: Creating the Game Behaviour

These are tutorials to support programming coursework set for our First Year programming course. The students have been asked to produce a C# program that will take the part of one player in the game of Battleships.

Album Shower on Marketplace

Hot on the heels of Cheese Lander, you can now download and play with my second Windows Phone application. Album Shower displays your album artwork as a moving display on the phone screen. Touching any album starts playback. You can find out more at the Zune Marketplace link for the application.